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Spanisches Liederspiel, Op 74

Introduction

It seems likely that Schumann intended Op 74 to have something of a narrative unity: two individual lovers have a say in Melancholie and Geständnis and otherwise the ensembles personify the female lover (Erste Begegnung, Liebesgram, Botschaft and Ich bin geliebt) and the male (Intermezzo). But this cyclic concision was arrived at only after the first performance. The composer had at first planned the work differently: in the first version the alto also had a solo song, and the bass had two. After the first performance of the work the composer wrote to his friend Friedrich Kistner (30 April 1849) that the cycle needed tightening up. At this stage Schumann decided to cut the two slowish songs (the original numbers 4 and 6) – one for alto, and one for baritone; he felt that despite their charming effect they impeded the work’s dramatic flow. Schumann also admitted that Der Contrabandiste ‘isn’t, strictly speaking, part of the action’. It seems obvious that the discarded songs were Hoch, hoch sind die Berge (for alto) and Flutenreicher Ebro (for baritone), both composed in April 1849, and both recycled in the Spanische Liebeslieder, the rest of which were composed in November of that year. As for Der Contrabandiste, it seems that Schumann could not bear to lose it entirely so he published it as an appendix to the work. At a guess I think it likely that this was originally placed as the tenth song in the sequence in order to provide a contrast of mood and tempo between Geständnis and Botschaft.

In cutting song IV, songs III and V are adjacent and both in the key of G minor, which seems a pity in an otherwise tonally resourceful plan; separating two G minor songs with a number in the relative major had been a good idea. The loss of the gentle and mellifluous Flutenreicher Ebro (VI) removed a bridge between the very different moods of the deeply serious duet In der Nacht and the flippant Es ist verrathen. The excision of Der Contrabandiste deprives the cycle of a change of tempo resulting in the rather similar moods of IX and XI. Schumann’s second thoughts had both their pros and cons and it is easy to imagine a performance of the twelve-song version of this work on the concert platform today. Even in the published version the tonal scheme is somewhat reminiscent of the type which unites the Eichendorff Liederkreis Op 39 where the cycle begins in F sharp minor and ends in F sharp major having been through various related keys. The tonal relationships between the songs in the Spanisches Liederspiel are based on tonic to dominant or subdominant, minor to relative major, or relationships of the shared third (as between A minor and F major).

Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

'The four soloists couldn’t be bettered … a delight from start to finish … a treasure indeed, a disc anybody interested in Lieder ought to h ...'An irresistible palette of voices … Unmitigated pleasure, from start to finish' (BBC Music Magazine)» More

'The performances give unalloyed pleasure. Lott's still-radiant soprano combines beautifully with the vibrant, musky mezzo of Kirchschlanger, while Jo ...'I'll leave you to experience the conjuring for yourself. For conjuring it is: any element of the didactic is totally absent in this seamless garment ...» More

'Schäfer evokes comparison with Elisabeth Schumann and with the young Elly Ameling, whom in tone and freshness of response she often resembles. In sum ...'Her voice combines ethereal radiance and clarity with resolute, unwavering focus. Johnson's account of the piano parts is superlative [and] his bookl ...» More

One of the mysteries surrounding the contact between Schumann and Geibel is to do with the opening song. In Volkslieder und Romanzen des Spanier (it is the first item of the collection) this is a twelve-line poem. In Schumann’s setting it is twice as long. The Geibel version (the first twelve lines of the poem printed here) is charming, but it seems somehow incomplete: what is the point of a young girl (or in the case of Schumann’s setting, a pair of maidens) coming back breathlessly from a prickly encounter with rose bushes unless a young man has made an appearance? In the second half of this duet, after the suggestive imagery of blooming and plucking, a young man does indeed appear, slim and apparently handsome; he hands over a rose ‘mit Seufzen’. In this version the poem seems to be a metaphor for a sexual encounter, loss of virginity, and sighs of release.

Only the original (and shorter) version of the poem reappears in the Spanisches Liederbuch of 1852. The second volume of the Obras de Gil Vicente (edited by Barereta Feio and Monteiro, Hamburgo (sic), 1834 – surely one of Geibel’s sources) reveals that the original Vicente poem from his Triumfo do Inverno is a 12-line lyric which is scattered among other lines, and seems incomplete. It is all but certain, then, that the supplementary twelve lines are Geibel’s invention and are a pastiche of Vicente’s style. It is also possible that these lines were fashioned for Schumann’s use at his request at some time between 1846 (when composer and poet met) and 1849.

Schumann’s music is of a speed which uses a lot of words – if he had had a shorter poem he would have had to invent words of his own to make a satisfying musical shape of sufficient length. The volubility of the effect seems rather Spanish – the excitability of the young girls confessing their activities (at least in part) to the seemingly ever-present madre of folk literature. The thirds and sixths which sound between the women’s voices are indicative of folksong style – the scoring is prophetic of the Dvoòák duets for the same forces. One is reminded how near, in Schumann’s hands at least, the so-called ‘Spanish’ style can sound to authentic Bohemian music – the common ground between these two cultures being of course the music of the gypsy.

Prancing, dancing quavers in the left hand (marked ‘etwas markiert’ and staccato) suggest plucked guitars which underpin occasional fragments of melody in the right when the singers pause for breath. These right-hand interpolations are fashioned from fragments of the vocal line and are suggestive of dialogue and the sharing of information, surprised reaction and so on. There is a veritable bustle to this music with differently harmonised repetitions which somehow suggest the euphemism and reading-between-the-lines in these symbolic words. The story is suitably eked out in the manner of a narrator attempting to keep the audience on the edge of their seats and the whole is vibrant with contained excitement. Schumann achieves this at the same time as preserving the minor-key undertone in the text. This is the beginning of a relationship where one may expect opposition or heartbreak. What will follow from this confession is not clear, but there is an ominous tone to the forte postlude which suggests the incident the girls have described might have serious consequences for this Spanish Rosenkavalier. In fact the whole cycle could be seen as a chronicle of the lovers’ tribulations ending on a note of defiance in the ninth song, Ich bin geliebt.

Those who know Hugo Wolf’s wonderful setting of these lines (No XXVII of the Spanisches Liederbuch) may be forgiven for finding Schumann disappointing. But Schumann’s almost shy little duet has its own beauties and felicities. It is the shortest song in the set and Schumann’s title Intermezzo makes its role clear – it is a transition piece into the more substantial duet which follows it. Wolf writes a perfect Spanish lover’s serenade where (with dotted rhythms knocking at the door of the girls’ dreams with a sequence of increasingly urgent harmonies) the serenader’s feet are placed on the ground. Schumann on the other hand, wooed by images of the Guadalquivir, unashamedly writes water music. He envisages the lovers already taking flight on the river. The Guadalquivir (the name is originally Arabic for ‘Great River’) is the major watercourse of Southern Spain; it flows in a westward direction for 657 kilometres and empties into the Gulf of Cadiz. There is no sense in this music of that river’s scale and grandeur. The vocal lines, firmly entwined as a metaphor for the lovers themselves, are gently carried forward on a cruising bank of murmuring quavers in the accompaniment’s viola register. The mezzo-staccato crotchets in the pianist’s right-hand adorn the phrase ‘wir wandern von hier’ and suggest knocking at a door; but the music is mostly given over to the dreams of being cradled on the water, the fleeing lovers protected by its undulations. Urgency dissolves into a sensual dream. The final setting of the word ‘mir’ in the closing three bars of the song is an unusually mellifluous melisma sinking into the depths of the bass line.

Schumann has left out lines from Geibel’s translation. It seems that when he came to ‘Dort ohne Liebe’ – ‘there without love’ (which in the original precedes ‘Und ohne Pein’) – he could not bear to envisage death and burial unless it were sustained by love from those left behind. His own title of Liebesgram makes clear that the composer envisages this poem as having sprung from the sorrows of love; but it is also clear that he would neither wish to be rid of love itself, nor to escape from it. This suggests the superstitious husband who would expect his widow to continue to love him when he dies. Wolf on the other hand does not shirk from the poet’s more lonely image and uses the complete poem in a setting which is an exercise in tortured chromaticism, all the better to suggest the calming effect of rest found at last in the sublime final cadence, ‘Wirst ruhig sein’. The hovering presence of the grave dominates Wolf’s magisterial and slow music.

Once again Schumann, forty years before Wolf, takes a different tack. His duet in G minor is an outpouring where longing for the grave induces a restless mood. This is music for a fruitless search. This anguish, signalled by a dramatic jump of a unison ninth for both voices at the opening (followed by a canonic imitation of this in the accompaniment), strikes a somewhat melodramatic, even desperate, note that suggests the Spanish temperament with reasonable success. The accompaniment occasionally echoes the dying fall of the voices at certain cadences but is largely given over to shadowing the vocal line. The poem’s third strophe (beginning ‘Was du im Leben’) is set to music in G major where the turbulence dissolves into rather dreamier mood. The presence of a two-against-three accompaniment still suggests striving for the unattainable; this ensures that this music is not suggestive of true peace, only the state of mind which longs for it. In this strophe Schumann omits Geibel’s sixth line ‘Und ohne Pein’ for reasons of metrical symmetry.

Unlike Wolf, Schumann cannot resist a recapitulation which returns to the opening two strophes of the poem, the gestural leaps of a ninth, and the forte music of the opening. Apart from a three-bar coda which ends the duet with a suitable flourish, the form is a traditional ABA. This duet’s tonality and the lie of the vocal line prophesy Schumann’s Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt (Goethe) written in June of the same year. Of course the two songs for female voices have as their common theme the suffering associated with unrequited love.

Once again one must mention a famous Hugo Wolf setting (Spanisches Liederbuch XXI) – a song built on one of his most haunting melodies, but much more straightforward than this wonderful duet. The soaring vocal lines of Schumann’s construction bring to mind the arches and buttresses of a great cathedral, a metaphor more appropriate perhaps for the choral masterpieces of the early eighteenth century. As an inhabitant of Leipzig, Schumann had been surrounded by reminders of Bach and must have walked past the Thomaskirche almost every day. He was also close friends with Mendelssohn who had made it his personal mission to re-integrate Bach into nineteenth-century musical life. Many of the texts associated with this composer were of a religious and self-mortifying nature; Spain was above all a highly religious country. The composer seems to have associated meditative and tormented Spanish poetry (dating mainly from earlier centuries) with the old and ‘learned’ musical style. It is clear that he saw the style of Bach and his contemporaries as another possible facet of Spanish characterisation and a contrast to the secular fandango and bolero. Hugo Wolf, in casting his Mühvoll komm’ ich und beladen (Spanisches Liederbuch VII) as a sarabande worthy of the grandeur of the Escorial, also linked the rigours and exaltation of Spanish Catholicism with musical time-travel.

There are no doubt a number of ways for singers and pianists to tackle In der Nacht in performance. The unwinding figurations of the piano writing may seem an irresistible invitation to ‘meaningful’ romantic rubato – and the piece is often performed very freely and sentimentally. The two singers have to sustain long-breathed lines and must make comprehensible sense out of sentences which often sprawl over a number of bars. Underneath these vocal lines the accompaniment has a life of its own; but too much rubato from the pianist will fragment the work’s unity and diminish its culminative power. On the other hand if one acknowledges the influence of Baroque music in a duet of this kind (where the two voices sing different texts and ‘collide’ horizontally rather than being aligned vertically) many of these problems are resolved. If an ‘early music’ tempo is adopted (here a slow one-in-the-bar which is in any case suggested by the composer’s phrasing) the pianist’s almost incessant quavers, triplets and ornamental semiquavers keep the music on the move. The linear clarity of a Bach cantata should be imagined here – an oboe announces the opening right-hand figuration (and remains an obbligato instrument throughout) while strings fill out the texture of the accompaniment and the sustained left-hand line suggests an organ pedal rather than a piano. The vocal lines, supported by the bass, are only two of several equally important interweaving lines which make up the complete musical structure – which is why architectural metaphors come to mind.

The relationship between this music and the impassioned outpourings of Schumann’s Mignon (‘Kennst du das Land?) from June 1849 seem clear in the light of their shared tonality of G minor as well as certain motivic similarities. After a seven-bar introduction, which is complete in itself (its falling sequences were to be recycled as the introduction of the Harper’s song Wer nie sein Brod mit Tränen ass) the soprano begins her long ‘aria’. We almost forget that the tenor is due to participate. As we have mentioned the keyboard writing seems powered by its own logic, an extended counter-melody with touches of imitative counterpoint which add to the music’s mournful majesty. It takes 38 spacious bars for the soprano to sing all the words in the six-lined text, and this section includes various repetitions of ‘nur nicht du’. The entry of the tenor comes as something of a surprise: his first words are masked by a repeat of the soprano’s final line ‘seiner Liebe zu’ but such baroque collisions are designed to grate deliciously on the ear. The tenor line masquerades briefly as a canonic reply to the soprano’s exposition. In fact the counterpoint is not rigorous, no Bach-like miracles are achieved, but the sense of homage is obvious. Seven bars after the tenor has begun his progress through the text (taking up the melody we heard at the beginning of the song) the soprano begins again with a new melody for ‘Alle gingen, Herz, zur Ruh’. The two voices now entwine without seeming to be aware of doing so; it is as if two lovers are both lost in their own inner thoughts and it is only the listeners who are able to hear their separate strands as a musical unity. Eventually the nineteenth century reasserts itself and the two singers catch up with each other with a unison ‘Liebe zu’. A three-bar piano interlude sets the stage for a coda which yields to a more romantic musical style for the first time; a diminished-seventh chord decorated by flowing quavers is the gateway to a cadence where the austerities of G minor are softened with touches of the major key. For a final ‘Alle gingen, Herz, zur Ruh’ the voices re-emerge in unison and remain so for the remainder of the piece, a shortened reworking of the poem where Geibel’s third and fourth lines disappear.

This is one of Schumann’s great nocturnes with some similarities to Zwielicht in the Eichendorff Liederkreis Op 39. The opening diminished-chord chromaticism of that marvellous song, a masterpiece of the romantic song repertoire, seems similarly inspired by organ improvisations of the old style. In any case it is clear that Schumann understood the sense of drama which is at the heart of Baroque music (cf the pomposo dotted rhythms of Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome in Dichterliebe). Both In der Nacht and Zwielicht should be thought of as dramatic rather than somnolent; the duet recorded here is a particularly grand meditation which, in musical terms, contains elements of past, present and future (the Spanisches Liederspiel is a transitional work which lies between the song year 1840 and the emergence of Schumann’s late style). The composer aimed for a quality of noble desperation which was part of his concept of Spanish stylisation; I find myself thinking of El Greco’s View of Toledo where the imposing and mournful landscape seems both medieval and modern although it was in fact painted in the seventeenth century.

In der Nacht from the Spanisches Liederspiel more than matches Wolf’s great version of the same text. It is set as a duet for soprano and tenor, and expresses the lovers’ mutual passion in a long and aching vocal phrase, begun by the soprano, echoed by the tenor and then finally shared. There can be no deeper expression in the entire song repertoire of the power of love to banish sleep.

That you are glowing with passion, O sly ones, can easily be seen, For your cheeks reveal The secret of your heart.

Ever revelling in sighs, Ever weeping instead of singing, Spending wakeful nights And avoiding sweet sleep - These are the signs of that passion Your countenance reveals, And your cheeks reveal The secret of your heart.

That you are glowing with passion, O sly ones, can easily be seen, For your cheeks reveal The secret of your heart.

Love, money and grief are to me The hardest to conceal, For even with the sternest souls They force themselves to the surface. Your restless mood Betrays them too clearly, And your cheeks reveal The secret of your heart.

The composer’s marking is ‘Im Bolerotempo’ and this is a signal for a delicious pastiche in Spanish style. It is also the single song in the cycle which is not associated with the lovers themselves but rather is a commentary on their relationship. In Geibel the addressee of the poem is singular (‘du’) and her name is Ines (the second line is ‘Ines, läßt sich leicht gewähren’). Schumann decides to address a pair of girls (‘Daß ihr steht’, where ‘ihr is the plural of ‘du’) and the name Ines is changed to ‘Schlaue’ – ‘sly ones’ in the plural. It is as if the two excited girls who came back blushing from the rose bushes in Erste Begegnung are both being confronted by the village. The music jokes and teases: ‘we know what you are up to, do not try to pretend you are not in love – everything about your appearance gives you away’. Unfortunately the composer fails to carry through the idea of the girls in the plural, and reverts to the singular ‘dein’ halfway through the poem.

This is music for canny village gossips who enjoy drawing out their taunts to the full, and of course the vocal quartet is the ideal medium for this type of collective accusation. Nothing damages the mood of this amused and amusing music than performing it too fast. The bolero is a dance in a moderate tempo– as Ravel’s famous orchestral piece proved, its power is in its rhythm rather than its speed. From the musical point of view this quartet can make an exciting effect when performed a breakneck tempo, but this makes nonsense of the text which can easily sound gabbled rather than knowing. A true bolero tempo paints the accusers weaving and dancing around their victims, enjoying every moment of the discomfort of those accused. But of course this is not about serious opprobrium – Schumann’s music implies that the teasing is merciless but basically good-hearted.

The vocal writing is almost always in four parts with no solo passages for the voices. The happy B flat major tonality of the first section (the poem’s first four lines) gives way to a minore in the second section (F minor – C minor – G minor and so on). The words ‘geheim im Herzen ruht’ are set so as to suggest intrigue and secrecy ruthlessly exposed. A very tricky five-bar interlude for the piano with a crunch of pleasantly clashing harmonies leads back to the music of the opening. Schumann repeats the ‘Daß ihr steht in Liebesglut’ section with which the piece has opened and the ABAB structure of the quartet is completed by a musical repeat of the minore with new words. Dotted rhythms, circular roulades of semiquavers (a pianistic flourish which will be heard again later in the cycle in Botschaft) and a strong bass line, often in octaves, accentuate the Spanish style. The quartet ends with a lively postlude, jumping with vitality, which is derived from the earlier interlude.

When, when will the morning come, when, when, that will release my life from these bonds? You my eyes, so clouded by sorrow, saw only torment instead of love, saw no joy; saw only wounds upon wounds, agony upon agony inflicted on me; and in my long life, not one cheerful hour. If it would only finally happen that the hour would arrive when I could no longer see!

Once again Schumann attempts to ring the changes in terms of Spanish stylisation. The teasing of the bolero now yields to a solemn sarabande contorted with violent emotions. Like In der Nacht, this song – the first solo item in the Spanisches Liederspiel – is the composer’s attempt at a very particular pastiche style where Spanish temperament meets the powerful vogue for the revival of Baroque music spearheaded by Schumann’s revered colleague Mendelssohn. Here we have a real attempt to enter into the Iberian temperament – volatile and extreme, yet always governed by the formalities of rigid etiquette translated here into the dotted rhythms and flourishes of old music. For Schumann, Spanish music seems to have meant a certain Baroque grandiosity combined with improvisatory freedom as if he envisaged the Escorial of Philip II somehow combined with the Moorish extravagances of the Alhambra. If this is part of the armchair tourist’s perennial tendency to regard Castille and Andalusia as freely interchangeable, there is many a non-Englishman who believes that Oxford and Cambridge are next-door neighbours; the fact is that from a great enough distance they merge quite comfortably as national trademarks.

Schumann’s mock-Spanish ingredients are Bach (a suggestion of counterpoint, double-dotted rhythms and vocal melismas) organ music (mighty striding bass lines in the accompaniment and a grandeur for which the piano seems insufficient) and occasional flourishes of semiquavers requiring digital precision over which the ghost of Scarlatti (who died in Madrid) seems to preside. The vocal line is more distraught (there are suggestions of suicidal violence) than is usually found in German lieder. And yet everything is presented within a frame which betokens role-playing in an evening of domestic music-making rather than the real thing. Schumann seems to be having fun in allowing the soprano to voice despair and frustration, and there is no doubt that the music was partly written to parody (even if affectionately) the volatility of southern folk. The indication ‘Mit Affekt’, the accents which imply stifled sobs, and the wildly contrasting dynamics all suggest droll exaggeration.

It is such a common occurrence for a composer to repeat the words of a poem in order to elongate his setting that it is curious to report that in this case Schumann shies away from Geibel’s original threefold repetition. The second line of Geibel’s translation reads ‘Wann denn, wann denn, wann denn!’ The composer sets only two of these. The soprano has a remarkable melisma of the word ‘Leben’ (‘decorated as if in commentary on life’s length and futility’ as Eric Sams puts it) which is answered two bars later and a fourth lower by the piano in quasi-fugal style. The decorative turn on ‘eine Freude’ sounds rather Spanish but had long been a standard Schumannian device to emphasise an emotional point (cf Er, der Herrlichste von allen in Frauenliebe und -leben). Much more unusual is the sudden leap upwards of an eleventh on ‘endlich doch geschähe’. This is the nearest Schumann ever came to writing a type of verismo aria in the lied but there are other songs with a similar sense of southern abandon: one thinks of Mignon’s overwrought Heiss mich nicht reden written in June 1849, where there are similar spirited clashes between voice and accompaniment, as well the tellingly dramatic vocal line of Mignon – Schumann’s setting of ‘Kennst du das Land.’

When, when will the day dawn that shall release my life from these bonds? You my eyes, so dim with weeping, have seen only the pangs of unrequited love, have not beheld one solitary joy, have seen me given only wound on wound, grief on grief, and in a whole long life not one single happy hour. If only, if only it would come to pass that I behold the hour when I see no longer.

After gentle meanderings in the garden characterised by flowing semiquavers and wandering chromatics, it is a welcome change in this music to find something etched in sharper rhythms and with more violent emotions. As part of Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel (a work for four singers) it is the composer’s attempt at a very particular pastiche style where Spanish temperament meets the powerful vogue for the revival of baroque music spearheaded by Schumann’s friend and revered colleague Mendelssohn. As in the Geistliche Lieder from Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch the music is not Spanish in the obvious sense of twanging guitars and bolero rhythms; both composers were capable of that, of course, in a number of their songs, but here we have a real attempt to enter into the Iberian temperament—volatile, dangerous and extreme, yet always governed by the formalities of rigid etiquette translated here into the dotted rhythms and flourishes of old music. For Schumann, Spanish music meant a certain baroque grandiosity combined with improvisatory freedom, as if he envisaged the Escorial of Philip II somehow combined with the Moorish extravagances of the Alhambra. This is part of the armchair tourist’s perennial tendency to regard Castile and Andalusia as freely interchangeable as an American tourist may regard Oxford and Cambridge. The fact is that from a great enough distance they merge quite comfortably. Schumann’s Spanish ingredients seem to be Bach (a suggestion of counterpoint, double-dotted rhythms and vocal melismas), organ music (mighty striding bass lines in the accompaniment and a grandeur for which the piano seems insufficient), and occasional flourishes of semiquavers requiring digital precision over which the ghost of Scarlatti (who died in Madrid) seems to preside. The vocal line is utterly different from the smooth and demure whisperings of a German flower. This is a different type of depression altogether, suicidal and violent, although always presented here within a frame which suggests role-playing in an evening of domestic music-making rather than the real thing. Schumann seems to be having fun in allowing the soprano to voice despair and frustration, and there is no doubt that the music is partly written to raise a smile at the volatility of Southern folk. The indication ‘Mit Affekt’, the accents which imply stifled sobs, and the wildly contrasting dynamics all suggest droll exaggeration. The paradox is that we now realise that in the composer’s own marriage Clara, the unfulfilled artist and overworked mother, must have controlled and repressed emotions not so far from these. The singer has a remarkable melisma of the word ‘Leben’ (‘decorated as if in commentary on life’s length and futility’—Sams) which is answered two bars later and a fourth lower by the piano in quasi-fugal style. The turn on ‘eine Freude’ sounds rather Spanish but had long been a standard Schumannian device to emphasise an emotional point. Much more unusual is the sudden leap upwards of an eleventh on ‘endlich doch geschähe’. This is the nearest Schumann ever came to writing a type of verismo aria in the Lied.

This is how I love you, beloved: My heart does not dare To express a single wish – That is how I love you! For if I dared to wish, I would immediately hope; Were I brash in my hope, I know I would anger you. And so I summon death alone To appear, For my heart does not dare To express another wish; That is how I love you!

This is a rather curious song that has never entered the mainstream Schumann repertoire. It is most unusual to hear it outside its place in the sequence of the Spanisches Liederspiel (how different this is from the tenor solo in the Minnespiel cycle for quartet, Meine schöner Stern). Of course Geständnis is difficult to sing; the tessitura has uncomfortable patches for all but accomplished tenors (remember that this Liederspiel was aiming at a domestic, and essentially amateur, market – the members of the Dresden Liedertafel and Chorverein for example), and the vocal line is so densely written that there is scarcely a pause for breath. The Spanish flavour of the music is confined to a suggestion of thrummed guitar chords in the song’s prelude and postlude (as if the performer were reassuring himself that his instrument still worked), an ardent manner, and a single wide-ranging melismatic passage (on the word ‘andern’) towards the end of the song.

The opening melody is beautiful and slightly operatic in cast; there is a southern ardour about it which could as easily be Italian as Spanish. The piano part is surprisingly fussy: a ceaseless slew of semiquavers, a veritable moto perpetuo, and this has to be as cleverly managed as the vocal line. The poem is a passionate one, but like Wolf’ settings of the Italian rispetti which make up his Italienisches Liederbuch the mood of desperation has to be tempered by persuasive charm; the longing for death expressed here is more of an artistic convention than a genuine suicide note.

Geständnis is the male counterpart of the Goethe/von Willemer setting Liebeslied (Hyperion Schumann Edition Volume 4); it has the same sort of attractive melody (in both cases this begins unceremoniously in a slightly wrong-footed way) and a similarly busy accompaniment which snakes between the hands and the various registers of the keyboard. In both songs there seems to be an element of thinning inspiration and note-spinning in the keyboard writing – a weakness of the late style: at times it is as if the composer were treading water in the absence of being certain how to make the vocal line truly gel with the accompaniment. The postlude is rather lame and the return of the thrummed guitar effect seems tacked on at the last minute. As in all the songs of Schumann with late-style characteristics the music requires sympathetic handling. The temptation is to rush, an understandable response to the teeming blackness of the printed page, but a hectic performance robs the song of its essentially intimate staging. Geständnis is more effective as an innig, rather than a vehement, love song. None of Schumann’s dynamic marking contradicts the opening piano; the most frequent direction is fp which the composer uses as a means of underlining rather than hammering – an emotional nudge rather than an abrasive accent.

All you flame-red carnations Which the morning presented me, I send you to him as messengers Of that passion which devours me. And you dear white blooms – Greet him gently with your fragrance. Tell him I am pale with longing, That I wait for him in tears.

I gather carnations and jasmine, And my heart thinks of him. A thousand flowers, drenched in dew, I find in the valley, newly awakened; Though all blossomed but today, Their splendour will be gone When the next smiling morning dawns. Speak, O fragrant jasmine, Speak, O flame-red carnations, Can love too wither so quickly? Ah, my heart thinks of him!

This is a wonderful piece, another bolero, suffused with the perfume of the flowers that it describes, and effortlessly Spanish in its extraordinary mixture of energy and languor. The first thing we hear is a trill in the accompanist’s right hand – a surprisingly memorable feature of the piece; scarcely could Schumann ever have used this pianistic device to better effect in his songs. Trills shimmer here and there in this duet like the plashing of fountains at the end of distant corridors in the Alhambra. Then the pianist stretches a seventh upwards in the right hand while simultaneously sinking to the tonic in the left; the right hand turns in on itself and four semiquavers descend in a gallant little figuration which elegantly decorates and fills out the tonic chord. At the same time the left hand has established a dotted rhythm which adds a definably Spanish frisson to the texture. In a few seconds Schumann has evoked Iberia and some of its opposites: the skipped heartbeat of love and the lazy, sexual stretch of women in a Moorish seraglio.

This is what the music alone tells us, but as soon as we hear the text (‘Nelken wind’ ich und Jasmin’) we realise that Schumann’s inspiration comes from the words themselves. The two girls are making a garland of flowers to send to the lover and the piano’s two introductory bars – the composer’s response to ‘wind’ ich’ – describe their work. This is the secret of that trill followed by the circular movement of the hand: the pianist must weave and plait these fragile blossoms with the most delicate and agile of fingers. As the girls work, the idea of alternating carnation and jasmine in a floral wreath gives rise to imitative writing between the voices. A full bar after the soprano has begun the melody the alto begins the same tune an octave lower. At ‘und es denkt’ the singers have moved closer together and now the response is as quick as thought: the alto’s echo of the words is at the distance of a breathless quaver. The voices come together at ‘an ihn’, a phrase which the composer repeats in a marvellous musical depiction of a lovesick swoon; the singers’ sensual minims drooping to the third below are supported by the ongoing staccato rhythms of the pianist’s bolero, and then a delicious interlude where swaying semiquavers in the soprano register of the keyboard are followed a bar later by repeat of the notes an octave lower, as if the viola were echoing first violin.

Schubert wrote a song about the language of flowers (Die Blumensprache D519) which begins with the word ‘Flowers show what the heart is feeling’. Both Schumann and Geibel would have been very aware of the mid-nineteenth-century convention of sending a lover bouquets where the choice of flowers contained a coded message. The poem is by an ‘unknown author’ – could this be Geibel himself? The rhyme of ‘Nelken’ and ‘welken’ (‘carnation’ and ‘wither’) is very Geibelesque and almost too good to be true for a real translation from the Spanish. In the language of flowers the meaning of a red carnation is ‘Alas for my poor heart’; Jasminum officinale betokens goodness, amiability and grace. Thomas Moore wrote of ‘brides delicate and fair / As the white jasmine flowers they wear’. And here we have two aspiring brides, a Spanish Fiordiligi and Dorabella, who are tearfully longing for love and all too aware that the freshest of blooms will soon wither. All they can do is to send a garland as a message – a Botschaft – and hope for the best. The scenario seems more Biedermeier than Spanish.

But the composer is determined to evoke Spain and he succeeds in this, the longest and most complex number in Op 74. The duet is shaped as a grand rondo where the composer allows the phrase ‘Nelken wind’ ich und Jasmin / Und es denkt mein Herz an ihn’ to appear three times and then lastly as a dreamy coda. (The words occur only once in Geibel in this conjunction.) The piano is responsible for the sensuous dance which keeps a slinky element of longing simmering in the background throughout the piece; the dotted rhythms paw the ground with the frustration of a caged animal, the rhythm holding openly expressed passion on a leash. The interplay of all three performers is extremely resourceful as is the use of harmony; at the end of the first verse the pile-up of imitative counterpoint between the voices on the phrase ‘ich auf ihn harr’ in Tränen’ is crowned by an eloquent repetition of the melody in the piano in a higher tessitura than the soprano could manage. Then the tension of waiting for the lover to respond is wonderfully captured by the elongation of the cadence which will return us to the tonic and the second appearance of the rondo theme. This is introduced by a florid scale passage from the pianist which is still underpinned by the strutting left-hand bolero rhythm.

The second verse is an exact musical (though not verbal) repetition of the first. No matter, the music is good enough to hear twice. Another scale passage from the pianist introduces what seems to be a third verse. It certainly begins as a repetition of the song’s opening page but it leads to an extended coda which is full of new material – in fact it is like a cadenza section of an operatic aria. The words ‘Ach, es denkt mein Herz an ihn!’ are repeated ad libitum and here is where the singers are most challenged. As the soprano floats her melismatic ‘Ach’ the alto weaves in writhing quavers beneath her on the word ‘ihn’. Two bars later the soprano has the quavers and the alto the descant crotchets, and finally they come together for a passionately lovesick display of quavers in thirds and sixths on the word ‘ach’. It is unlikely that the freedom of this writing for high and low female voice would have been possible without the example of Bellini’s Norma (1831) where the dazzling interplay of the tessiture of the eponymous high priestess and Adalgisa added a new and more dramatic dimension to the possibilities of female duet-singing already explored by Mozart in Così fan tutte. Norma and Adalgisa, like the protagonists of Botschaft, are united by comradeship as they sing of the sorrows of love.

A fleeting homage to Italian opera is sufficient. The song’s final eight bars return to the innig world of the lied. A final wistful repeat of ‘Nelken wind’ ich’ leads to a slow and heartfelt ‘und es denkt’ in thirds, separated, as if with a rueful sigh, from the concluding ‘mein Herz an ihn’ which stretches into sixths between the voices. The accompanist’s closing moments are delicious; almost the last thing we hear is the piano’s trill as if it were the dying tremor of unrequited love. And then the final plucked chord playfully reminds us that this Liederspiel is, after all, only a game.

Let all evil tongues Always say what they like: Whoever loves me I love back, And I know that I am loved.

Wicked, wicked rumour Your tongues whisper mercilessly, But I know they are merely Hungry for innocent blood. Never shall it worry me – Gossip as much as you want; Whoever loves me I love back, And I know that I am loved.

Slandering is the only thing that’s understood By the one who has missed out on love and affection, Since he himself is so wretched And no one woos and wants him. That’s why I think that love, Which they revile, gives me honour; Whoever loves me I love back And I know that I am loved.

If I were made of stone and iron, You might insist That I should reject Lover’s greeting and lover’s plea. But my little heart is now unfortunately Tender, as God grants us maidens; Whoever loves me I love back, And I know that I am loved.

The poem is far better known in Hugo Wolf’s setting (XIII from the Spanisches Liederbuch). There the composer’s genius has allowed himself utterly to identify with the mood of the girl: she is as cheekily insouciant as Carmen, contemptuous of her detractors, and absolutely convinced she has the love and backing of a man whose good looks and strength are such that she has nothing to fear. In fact she rather enjoys playing cat and mouse with the village gossips because she is cleverer than they are. Also built into the music is the playful sexiness that has landed her catch in the first place. We imagine that her defiance of tradition and convention extends into the bedroom.

Schumann has taken a different tack entirely. For him the key words are ‘alle bösen Zungen’ and as he has four tongues to play with in a vocal quartet he rejoices in making these singers the village gossips, even if the poem is actually spoken by one lone female voice. He encompasses this fact by allowing the alto to emerge from the texture in a solo capacity for ‘Wer mich liebt, den lieb’ ich wieder’ and so on. Around these appearances he has great fun in ranging the women and men in antiphonal sections, a type of stereophonic effect in duet singing. This suggests that the jabbering and whispering of scandal is coming from all sides and is mightily relished by everyone. There is some marvellous part-writing in this piece: the thirst for innocent blood (the section beginning ‘doch ich weiss es, sie sind lüstern’) results in a chase where the alto’s race for damning evidence is taken up by the soprano followed by the tenor and then the bass, each voice only two beats apart. This recalls some of the choral writing of Peter Grimes written to the same purpose. The way gossip spreads like wildfire through a small community is superbly conveyed with writing of this kind, always abetted by an accompaniment where claws are as sharp as tongues. The very singers who are mouthing a text about defying evil gossips are depicting those evil gossips themselves. This is a curious use of the quartet medium, but it works.

The tempo marking of ‘Sehr lebhaft’ – ’very lively’ – is very unusual in Schumann’s vocal music, common enough in his piano writing. It should be adhered to and this piece is the cycle’s real virtuoso finale. The leaping quavers in the piano are a counterpart to similar writing in Erste Begegnung at the beginning of the cycle and we note that we have come full circle to the key of A major in a work that had begun in A minor. Perhaps all this gossip is the final result of the ‘First Meeting’ – somehow Schumann suggests that it is. The composer had originally given the alto a solo of her own in this cycle but this is her only chance to be heard on her own in Op 74. She steps forward from the ranks in three sections marked ‘Langsamer’ (slower) in order to tell us of her love as an individual. In most performances this is sung simply ‘langsam’ (slow). This is a mistake. A simple relaxation of tempo as the composer asks (rather than a halving of it) makes the girl determined and defiant rather than sentimental and lovesick – the feisty dotted rhythm and accent on ‘ich bin geliebt’ suggest this is how Schumann saw her too.

The song’s second section begins with a repeat of the poem’s two opening lines, this time in unison. Loud piano flourishes in rising harmonic sequence alternate with conspiratorial vocal writing (‘Zur Verleumdung … sich verstehet’) which once again suggests that the four voices are actually partaking in slander rather than condemning it. But this is the way that Schumann has decided to use his chorus and it is most effective. And so the music continues, quartet alternating with solo. There are changes of detail (the scampering heartbeats in the piano under ‘Doch mein Herzlein ist nun leider/Weich’) but the progressive Schwung of the piece is uncompromised. For the last appearance of ‘Wer mich liebt, den lieb’ ich wieder’ the chorus sings in unison (as if the village gossips have been won over at last to the girl’s point of view) without a change of tempo. The coda is a lively peroration based entirely on the words ‘ich bin geliebt’. We are suddenly aware of the composer’s gratitude that he too is loved (by Clara) despite what everyone else says or thinks. Perhaps the work has been another Minnespiel in all but name. The last ‘geliebt’ is almost shouted in an exultant forte followed by a syncopated scurry up the keyboard as semiquavers chase each other between the hands. Three loud chords in A major mark the official ending of the Spanisches Liederspiel.

I am the smuggler, and know well how to inspire respect; I know how to defy everyone, and I fear no one. So let us be merry! Who shall buy my silk and tobacco? Truly, my little horse is tired, I hurry, yes, hurry, otherwise the patrol will catch me, and then things will go very badly! Run, my merry horse, ah, my dear, good steed, you know well how to carry me!

In the published version of Op 74 the bass plays only a small part – one duet and two quartets out of nine numbers, and none of these three ensembles allows the lower voice to emerge with any prominence. And yet in the original Spanisches Liederspiel the bass was assigned two solo songs – the beautiful Romanze (Flutenreicher Ebro) and the hectoring Der Contrabandiste. Both are exceptionally, and uncomfortably, high for a baritone – and even more so for a bass; neither of them compares in terms of tessitura with the easier bass writing in the ensemble numbers of the cycle. The Romanze is so high that it can easily be sung by a tenor; it is never (in my experience) performed by baritones in its original key of D major. Der Contrabandiste requires a baritone with command of an almost equally high tessitura and coloratura to boot. It is notable that Schumann writes the vocal line in the bass clef for both these songs, a convention he continues with the harper songs from Wilhelm Meister.

Awkward first performances of these two songs would almost certainly have affected Schumann’s judgement as to their worth. He said that he found the Romanze too static, and it is true that if the piece is not well sung it seems to last forever. The composer also realised that Der Contrabandiste did not fit into the cycle for sheerly textual reasons – it was not a song about love like all the others. It is my guess that it was originally placed between Geständnis for tenor and the soprano-alto duet Botschaft, and in that position would have stuck out like a sore thumb. It is understandable however that Schumann was loth to sacrifice such an effective item altogether. Accordingly he took the unusual step of publishing Op 74 with an appendix which is an far easier solution on paper than on the concert platform. The work has to be performed as it is here – as a type of solo encore in front of the curtain. This is easy enough for a disc but in a concert it seems unfair that the bass is the only singer with an encore, and even a song as effective as this seems anticlimactic after the closing quartet.

Where Schumann found this text has always seemed a mystery. It does not appear in Volkslieder und Romanzen der Spanier despite the fact that the printed edition of the music furnishes the song with a subtitle in Spanish. In fact the song is almost certainly a roundabout tribute to another of the Schumanns’ friends, the great singer Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) whom the couple first met in 1838, and with whom they made music on many an occasion. Viardot’s father was the tenor and singing teacher Manuel Garcia (1775-1832). This famous Spanish artist was also a composer and wrote a song titled El Contrabandista for his elder daughter (and Viardot’s sister) Maria Malibran, a mezzo soprano with a Callas-like fame in her day. This caballo (published c1828 in Paris by Pacini) was written as an interlude to be inserted into a production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. (Garcia had created the role of Almaviva in this opera in 1816.)

The text of Schumann’s Der Contrabandiste is a translation (probably by Geibel at the composer’s request) of the Spanish text of the Garcia song which begins:

Garcia song is in G minor, as is Schumann’s. Although the accompaniment of the Spanish song is in simple quavers, the vocal coloratura – comic ululations in sequences of shaking semitones – is so similar to the work recorded here that it seems clear that the Schumann piece seems to have been conceived in honour of Viardot as a re-composition of a family favourite. In any case this is a unique instance of a Spanish tonadilla meeting the German Lied. I am grateful to Christel Baum of H Baron in London for providing me with a copy of this rare song.

Despite the provenance of the poem, it seems close in mood to the bravado of Geibel’s Der Hidalgo, a song from 1840; in that Rollenlied for an ageing Don Quixote there is a hint of a comic streak, but all pretence of dignity is thrown to the winds here. This is a full-scale buffo aria sung by a ridiculous smuggler (would a real cut-throat ride a Pferdchen rather than a charger?) who is no more threatening than his pirate confreres from Penzance.

The accompaniment (the marking is ‘Schnell’) immediately sets the scene with a great deal of pianistic huffing and puffing. Three groups of swirling figurations in climbing thirds attempt to ascend the keyboard in the first three bars. The time signature is 2/4 with an emphasis on the fourth quaver of the bar, an accent which seems to be effectively ‘Spanish’. A bar of chromatic weaving (the source of the later vocal coloratura) is followed by a portentous trill on a D major chord (the dominant of the G minor tonality) which ushers in the entry of the voice in suitably melodramatic manner. This writing later sufficiently fascinated Carl Tausig (1841-1871) to make a solo piano arrangement of Schumann’s song. Tausig’s ‘fingers of steel’ (as Liszt called them) must have come in useful with the dazzling (and appropriately over-the-top) result. This piece was made famous by a celebrated recording by Rachmaninov, and more recently by Stephen Hough.

The singer’s hearty line is a tuneful posture, more a series of gestures than a real melody, and all the while the pianist continues with his palpitating arpeggios. Indeed the vocal part of the song is more or less conceived as an obbligato to a piano étude. Strong left-hand syncopations add to the swagger while the singer barks out two-bar phrases and such words as ‘Seide’ and ‘Tabak’ which sound more like commands than commodities. We gather that the smuggler is being chased by the Customs and Excise and that his horse is tired. He coaxes and cajoles his stumbling steed. This leads to the most extraordinary middle section which tests the coloratura technique of any singer who broaches it. There is nothing to compare in all Schumann’s lieder with these weaving vocal semiquavers on ‘liebes Pferdchen’. The precarious nature of executing this passage is a part of its effect: on hearing this teetering music one imagines an overweight and perspiring gangster balanced precariously on the back of a spindly donkey. A few months later Schumann was to set Goethe’s Kennst du das Land, a poem which includes a description of a dangerous mountain crossing in the Alps: ‘Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg’ (the mule seeks its way in the mist). The smuggler’s little horse seems similarly unsteady on his pins and it might have been that Schumann imagined the whole of this piece taking place in rocky mountainous terrain. This would account for the vertiginous aspect of this music; certainly the pianist feels as if he were scrambling up a rockface.

The words ‘Weisst ja davon mich zu tragen’ signal the beginning of a long accelerando as the horse gathers speed and the whole song gallops downhill and seems increasingly like an animated cartoon. The accompaniment moves into lolloping triplets for an entire page before the return of the vocal coloratura. This is now supported by stamping quaver chords in the piano which are decorated with acciaccature. In these we hear the glint of steel, the clink of spurs and happy-go-lucky defiance. It is all very jolly but Schumann was correct in realising that it has nothing whatever to do with the other songs of the Spanisches Liederspiel. Eric Sams’s laconic summing-up – ‘Exit, pursued by coastguards’ – is the best possible commentary on a piece that belongs more to the pantomime or vaudeville tradition than to the lieder platform. The history of the textual source, outlined above, explains why this song is such a musical curiosity.